Essays and Note Taking 13-10-2003

Essays and Note Taking 13-10-2003

Toyen, who rejected her name and chose to pursue her career as an artist under an assumed name, was the leading Czech surrealist and one of the many women who played important roles in the International Surrealist movement. A feminist before the name (and in Czech, her assumed name, does not have a gender), she rejected any suggestion that she play a woman ‘s role and endorsed the anarchist movement. She and the Czech poet, Jindrich Styrsky went to Paris in the early 1920 s and announced their own alternative to both Abstraction and Surrealism, Artificialism. By the mid – 1930 s, however, her work had become sufficiently Surrealist that, back in Prague, they became founding members of the Czech Surrealist group. In 1935, Andre Breton and the poet, Paul Eluard, came to Prague and began a lifelong friendship with Toyen, interrupted only by the Nazi invasion and conquest of Czechoslovakia. During the years of the occupation, Sponge Umbrella